General Election 2010: ‘madness’ to let untrained ministers to form Government, says thinktank

Inexperienced politicians need to be given more training before they take up
jobs as ministers, according to a thinktank.

The Institute for Government said it was “madness” that new ministers were not given any training before they took up positions running large Whitehall departments, with multi-billion pound budgets and tens of thousands of staff.

One former Cabinet minister told the institute: “The largest thing I’d run before this was my constituency office of four people – now I have a department of tens of thousands and a budget of billions.”

The thinktank said it was “remarkable” that politicians were “catapulted into extremely senior roles and responsibilities overnight, and yet receive almost no personal support or development."

It said that “in any other walk of life this would be considered madness”.

The institute recommended that the new Prime Minister should “insist on structured induction and development at all levels, from new backbenchers to experienced Cabinet operators”.

The PM and members of the new Cabinet could lead by example “by publicly committing to undertake a few hours of personal development” every three months.

The training could cover areas including budget and resource management, “working together to address joined-up problems”.

Other programmes could address how to prepare “for the bewildering and frustrating, but often thrilling, experience of running a government department”.

The thinktank also suggested that the “exhausted” new Prime Minister should take more time before making major new Government announcements.

A pressure “to hit the ground running” meant that “Prime Ministers usually have a matter of hours to announce Cabinet appointments, and at most a few days to form their entire government.

“This is symptomatic of an unusually strong mentality in British politics that politicians – despite being exhausted from the campaign trail – must issue a whole string of career-defining announcements within days of election”.

The advice said: “It all happens too quickly, and it risks bad decision making. In almost all other OECD countries – and certainly all of Europe – premiers allow themselves longer to think things through.”

Far better, the institute said, was to “announce the key security related or market sensitive appointments such as the Home Office and Treasury, and allow a few days to work through the rest”.

The study also suggested that the new Prime Minister should not rush into setting up new departments, as a way to signal a change in direction and grab the headlines.

The basic cost of setting up a new department was at least £15million while any benefits are not felt for at least three years.

Last year a separate report from the same thinktank said that a lack of training among ministers meant they resorted to using “posturing, tribalism, and exaggerated promising” to get their own way.

The skills regarded to be a good leader - how to tackle insoluble problems, personal organisation, people management and team work – were “simply missing from their vocabulary and knowledge spectrum”, it said.